After, same process as when you buy a gift card with cash. You must pay first before they activate the card and give it to you. This is a normal flow of retail. What is the question with this step?
I’m happy to discuss these things with you provided you are not rude. If you are rude to me, we are done here. Consider this your warning.
Lol fair enough.
Won’t even mention all the other chain rollbacks and fork battles
So, to sumarise the options, after you receive your storj payment, you can:
1.Hodl for a brighter future.
2.Exchange it to FIAT/gift card.
3.Exchange it to other Crypto.
Choosing 1, the best way is to “mine” and hodl in your wallet, not on an exchange. That’s pretty obvious. This is the risckyest move from what I can tell. All pointers say storj has no reason to go up, but who can tell the future?
Choosing 2, maybe the best way is to use an exchange wallet; it involves less hassle, you don’t have to wait for hours for transfers between addresses, and you can receive pretty much what your dashboard says in $. This is the lowest risk option, the rewards are predictible.
Choosing 3, depending on what crypto are you aiming for, and what fees are involved, the own wallet or an exchange wallet could be the solution. With the new crypto received, you can trade it in week trying to get 5-10% more FIAT out of your payment, or hodl. This appears less risckyer than the first option, and could be very rewarding after 1-3 years. But again, nobody can see the future.
My personal strategy? I do both 1 and 3. I hodl some Storj, hoping we will se again some nice exchange rates, and I exchange the rest to BTC or some major crypto, that I believe it will bring me much more than the present payout.
What you do with your tokens is your choice. We don’t recommend using anything but a wallet you own the keys to. Otherwise, if SNO’s used an exchange that we recommended and that exchange went belly up, the SNO’s would say we need to refund them for recommending the exchange. As we have pointed out, it is also a risk.
We do understand the logic that by sending tokens directly to an exchange you avoid having to pay the fees involved in moving the tokens from your wallet to the exchange. However, we always want to point you to the most secure option. There may be a guy named Dave who you can send your tokens to and he might give you more than an exchange. We wouldn’t recommend Dave either.
So, it is good policy to always recommend the most secure option. What you do from there is a choice you have to make. That’s all.
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You still do. You have a choice not to go through fiat in the first place.
But in reality, more than one Dave always exists, exchanges come and go, and only your wallet you have password from is an invariant. Trying to save few bucks does not justify extra headache tracking what’s going on with exchanges, keeping addresses updated, or thinking about this every month in the first place. The more I think about it the more I stand by the “not your wallet - not your money” mantra. Conventional banks are audited and regulated. Crypto is still Wild West. When you store stuff in your wallet — you trust math. When you store stuff at exchange you have to trust some random dudes. I don’t trust random dudes, and don’t want to think about them monthly.
This is not different in either of cases. Storj token value does not depend on where you deposit it. So, you have to trust Dave, annd keep track of the deposit anddress and I don’t. That’s the only difference. Storj token fluctuations affect both equally, asymptotically transaction costs at zero.
You are paying too much for conversion, but still, the ratio will go down over time. Transaction costs are fixed, payouts increase, so this is irrelevant.
This is irrelevant. You can continue laying them with cash. But if there is one service that you use which does accept cryptocurrency — you can pay them with converted tokens, and send cash to your lairs. Or are you earning with storj enough to cover rent, power, and food monthly? Then transaction fees converting to cash are small fraction of the cost and are irrelevant.
This is too late. Your tokens were just deposited to defunct address because exchange changed it and you had better things to do than read emails from them. See my point?
This is one of those cases when one approach is objectively better than the other, and if you have different opinion you end up taking up uncompensated risk.
Let’s elaborate here. What is the risk precisely? Losing a passphrase? I’m pretty sure most users have by now grasped the concept of password managers. I feel like risk of losing passwords is the very least thing most users need to wory about.
With third party exchanges you still need to have access to your account there. Still need a password, and recovery process. With your own wallet it’s the same. You have a passcode and a recovery process for your password manager. (Usually a printed master password on a piece of paper). Except with your wallet your risks stop here, and with exchanges - just start.
The primary risk, at least for me, is the complexity of the tooling. With the good old bitcoin I know I can just have the original standalone client working on its own blockchain copy and such. With the new fancy toys I have to install some weird browser extensions? WTF?
No :). I don’t have any extensions installed. The keys are added to a DApp wallet app on my phone, and when I want to connect to an exchange I scan the QR code and authorize/sign the transaction in the wallet. The passphrase never leaves my phone. No extensions needed.
But yes, there are wallets implement as browser extensions, why not, some people prefer that.
If anything — the tooling seems to “just work”, in contrast to having the whole copy of thechain and some weird client sheninigans 
That’s actually how I lost my passphrase once. Lastpass had a bug that made it lose additional fields stored with username and password info. I never was able to recover it. (It only had about $30 of value on it at the time, so not the biggest deal, but still.)
Anyway, lesson learned. Never rely on a single way to recover your pass phrase.
Whoa. Last pass was indeed a dumpster fire all around! This kind of issues should not have sneaked in pass unit testing, much less competent qa processes.
Very good advice. A good alternative backup — is analog: print, laminate, and into a desk drawer. (Or bank safe deposit box, depending on the value stored).
I keep my master passwords written on the piece of paper. Because I can get run over the truck tomorrow and someone needs to get access to my digital life. Or it could be myself — I can totally envision one day forgetting my master password that I have not changed in 15 years and type in daily. Then I’m kind of screwed. Accounts can be recovered through authenticated devices and biometrics but things like keys and wallets — not so much.
Ideally wallets should be able to store data encrypted on-device with biometics and absolve users from needing to manage secrets in the first place. But this will take some time until wide adoption.
This was long before the recent issues with LastPass. It used to be great, but ever since logmein acquired them, they’ve been going down the drain. The bug I ran into probably happened long before I needed my passphrase, but since you rarely ever use it, I found out much later. So they didn’t have any encrypted backups of my vault anymore to recover from either.
I do indeed use a physical backup “somewhere” as well now. In a place where it can’t possibly be linked back to my wallet or even me as a person. 
You can already get a subdermal implanted crypto wallet if you look hard enough. I’m gonna respectfully decline though. Haha. I have started using more than one password manager for my most important accounts though. Sure it widens the attack surface a little, but you also have to protect against yourself. And I can always change passwords if something happens to one of them.
I don’t trust my phone to the degree where I’d store security keys there. Are there any clients that are just standalone native Linux applications?
I used to have 2FA on my phone, but one day it hanged and all data was lost with phone. So it is not secured measure to hold keys.
How about a hardware wallet?
You could look into something like Authy, which syncs an encrypted backup of your 2FA codes across devices.
I don’t have one, would have to buy. For the typical Storj revenue it’s not worth it.
Wait, are you guys serious? I don’t know about android but iPhones are a superset of better version of “hardware wallet”, and the most secure device around me by a long shot: much better hardware, software security, and the one that you can’t “lose”, in the sense that losing it is harmless. I would never trust anything to some rinky-dink single “hardware wallet”. (I’m EE, I have seen how the sausage is made, no thanks)
Data is encrypted with strong keys, living in hardware (Secure Enclave), wrapped to the keys derived from your passcode, that you have a very limited number of tries to guess; data is replicated to iCloud, end to end encrypted, so losing the phone is not an issue whatsoever. I literally have my private key in Notes app, did not even bother saving it to keychain or a password manager.
There is a lot of much more sensitive data living on my (replaceable) phone and macs than a crypto wallet. I agree, buying a worse version of hardware security jus to hold a wallet would be a step back.
Phone security doesn’t help if I’m forced by law to unlock everything law enforcement demands. On a computer I can at least hide presence of valuable data, so that you would need deep forensics to even know there is a secret to unlock. Not so on a closed OS like Apple’s.
Besides, I actually use Android phones and I deliberately make them less secure than factory settings for my own convenience. I like having a device I can tweak as much as I like, but it comes with the trade-off of worse security. As such, I delegate the sensitive stuff to my computers.
So yes, I’m serious.
This choice was entirely under your control. Obviously, if you defeated all security, separate HW key may now look more appealing (unless you also defeat security there for convenience). (Side note: I would never weaken security on my main device. It’s sad that android requires users to weaken security to enjoy convenience. What a horrible design. Switch to iOS, where you don’t have to do that. Or don’t use development devices in production).
Fair enough. Replace “phone” with “computer” in my previous comment. The point is, we already have secure devices in a day to day life, that store and replicate encrypted data, there is no need buy crappy HW keys.
In the context of this whole discussions – it does not matter whether you store passphrase from your own wallet or login credentials to an exchange. So the whole discussion is moot – having separate wallet does neither increase nor decrease requirements to manage credentials safely.
I would too. There are already tons of biometrics available “out of the womb” on humans, implanting yet another one is stupid. I did microchip my cats though. But they don’t have a phone nor are very smart 
That’s a fine tradeoff. I instead backup password database and password manager app daily with infinite version history.